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A young waif with the word “Outlaw” tattooed on her left forearm reaches to pick it up.

Just 21, she is known as the bad girl of skateboarding. The table-flipping, golf-cart-stealing, cigarette-smoking, trash-talking, school-quitting, home-leaving, contest-winning kind of outlaw who can board-slide a knob-welded rail.

She can what?

Yeah, she can slide her skateboard down a stairway hand-rail on which someone has welded knobs specifically to prevent skateboarders from sliding down.

Skateboarding comes so naturally to Buena Park native Vanessa Torres that after competing in just two amateur competitions, she turned pro at age 14 - and won her first four contests. By age 15 she was so successful, she quit school, moved out of the house and grew up fast.

Too fast.

“I was the crazy one at parties,” she says, “getting in trouble, calling people out, giving everyone a hard time.”

At first, it was a dream come true for the self-described nerd and school loner. Suddenly she was accepted. Applauded. Adored.

Until first-place finishes became elusive. And younger competition got better. And injuries took a toll. Torres lost her confidence and moved back home.

“I wasn’t sure I wanted to skate anymore,” she says.

Ahh, but that cell phone is ringing. The tattooed arm reaches out. In seconds, her life will forever change. She is about to get the very thing she always wanted. And lose the one thing she always had.

YOUNG REBEL

She grew up barefoot on the wrong side of town. Living with gramma. Playing with the neighborhood boys.

“We skated every day,” she says. “Waxing up the curb and getting in trouble.”

The moment she learned to do a kick-flip (often, the second trick a skateboarder’s arsenal), it was like magic. Suddenly, nothing else mattered. She’d march home each night battered and bruised but smiling - even as mom said, “You’re going to get hurt.”

She didn’t care. She became a fixture at boys’ skate events.

“I was the kid everyone loved,” she says. “I made everyone laugh.”

Before there was even a girls’ contest for her to enter, a Laguna Beach skate shop sponsored her. They were, as Torres likes to say, “stoked.”

“I was the only girl rolling around,” she says. “They put word out: there’s this new girl.”

Indeed. At just her second amateur event, she placed first - besting future icon Elissa Steamer and landing a sponsor willing to send Torres around the world. Turning pro, she took first place in Florida, then first in Australia, then first at two contests in California. Meanwhile, she faced a crisis at school.

When she studied, her skating suffered. With $40,000 in the bank, she made a hard decision. Her mother watched her pack, asked her not to leave.

“Well,” Torres told her, “I’m going.”

JUST TALK

From the start, she was a rebel in a rebel’s world - the lone girl skating with a pack of boys.

There were few contests and fewer female pros to emulate. It took a certain gumption to even desire to be a pro female skater. But gumption is what Torres had. In spades.

It shows in her style - more like a guy’s: fast and smooth. It shows in her chain smoking as she slouches on her board over handrails, ramps and ledges. And it shows in her stories of tipping over the judges’ table at the Gravity Games in Cleveland because she didn’t approve of their scores.

“Usually when I get mad, I cry,” she says, revealing a softer side. “I was crying. ‘Dude, I don’t understand.’ But I’m older now. It’s not something I would do again.”

Then there’s the time she and a friend used nail-clippers to start a golf cart at an event for a thrill ride. It ended with a security guard on top of her and Torres crying again.

When the two would dream out loud of their futures, sometimes they’d joke: “Dude, I want to be in the Tony Hawk video game!”

But it was just that. Talk. Until now.

IDOL AND HERO

Tony Hawk towers over the skateboarding world like Bill Gates towers over the computer industry. Hawk’s $1 billion empire includes the No. 1 action-sports video game series in the world, in its ninth year.

So when Torres answered her phone to learn she’d be featured in the new “Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground,” she screamed, freaked, raced through her apartment touching things that didn’t need to be touched, opened and closed doors, ran outside and in, turned her computer on and off.

“My grandkids are going to see this!” she says of the just-released game. “It’s something very, very, like, permanent. This game is going to be on shelves at every Blockbuster and everywhere.”

Only two other pro female skaters have ever appeared in the game: Elissa Steamer and Lyn-Z Adams Hawkins.

“If you want to make money and be famous, that’s definitely a step in the right direction,” says skate-pal Amy Caron, pointing to the careers of Steamer and Hawkins. “Kids look up to you. You’re an idol and a hero.”

It also means the young waif with an X-Games gold medal, a Female-Skateboarder-of-the-Year award and an “outlaw” tattoo is no longer an outsider. No longer a rebel. She’s mainstream. And maybe that’s not as bad as all those 15-year-old skateboarding rebels are thinking right now.

“Skateboarding gave me a sense of independence and individuality and freedom,” Torres says. “Nobody can take that away from me.”

BAD GIRL: Anaheim native Vanessa Torres, 21, is known as the bad girl of female, pro skateboarding -- a small but growing legion. MATT BROWN, FOR THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
PROVING GROUND: Buena Park native Vanessa Torres is shown here and featured in Tony Hawk's Proving Ground video game.
TORRES: Anaheim native Vanessa Torres, 21, is known as the bad girl of female, pro skateboarding -- a small but growing legion. MATT BROWN, FOR THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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